Are H.S. Athletic Directors Worth Six Figures?

Donoher’s annual pay at $101,492 was published in a story about his arrest, and the six-figure compensation raised some eyebrows. Schoenlein, a high school athletic director in the 1980s, said the time commitment alone makes the job a difficult one.

“In my mind, $100,000 is very fair,” Schoenlein said.

With high-end high school athletic director salaries reaching into six figures, some have wondered if the job is worth the price.

“It’s an interesting position,” said Graham athletic director Brook Cupps, who also coaches boys basketball and teaches one math class. “As budgets decrease, it’s coming under more and more scrutiny as to what the AD does and people ask, ‘Is it really worth the money?’ I know a lot of ADs are having to take on assistant principal duties on top of their AD duties.”

The modern-day athletic director, observers said, is as much marketer and rules interpreter as officials organizer and game-scheduler. And despite the sometimes-generous pay, many administrators wouldn’t want to work the long hours or deal with issues involving coaches, athletes and parents.

Tecumseh athletic director Craig Eier, now in his fifth year in the position, once tried to track how many hours he works per week. He quit tracking after it became too difficult — yet he still loves the job no matter how much work it takes.

“I don’t even know how to describe the job,” Eier said. “I was cleaning up puke one Friday night. I was picking up flowers on Senior Night. If it has to be done, we do it. We’re on call 24-7. That’s the thing people don’t understand. My wife and kids get a little frustrated I’m never home. When my daughter was 3, my wife drove her by the high school, and she said, ‘There’s Daddy’s house.’ ”

A passion for sports and for seeing coaches and kids succeed drives Eier.

“I don’t consider it a job,” he said. “Do I feel guilty about the amount of money I make? Not at all.”

An analysis of athletic director salaries in the Greater Western Ohio Conference, Southwestern Buckeye League and Dayton City League showed that those working the position full time are paid an average of $80,591. In Clark County, salaries for full-time athletic directors range from $83,000 to $54,000.

Other districts — in some cases, looking to save money with one person holding multiple responsibilities — pay an employee as a full-time teacher and provide a stipend for athletic director work. Southeastern’s Tim Bell, for example, makes 75 percent of his salary as an intervention specialist.

However, officials stressed that comparing athletic director salaries can be misleading.

Responsibilities can vary between schools. Experience, longevity in a district, extra facilities and work added outside of the athletic department can boost an athletic director’s salary, and some have added titles to reflect their workload.

Whatever the responsibilities, the athletic director position is becoming more specialized.

“The days are gone when you take a warm body and say, ‘You’ll coach tennis or coach golf or be the athletic director,’ which is what happened 30 years ago,” said Bruce Whitehead, executive director of the National Interscholastic Athletic Administrators Association. “Those days are gone. The liability is the biggest issue.”

Range of responsibilities

Mark Stoll, the longtime North and now Springfield AD, sets aside 30-40 minutes every day just to work on scheduling. He’s working on next year’s wrestling schedule right now and is glad to have the football and basketball schedules ready for the next two years.

That’s just one part of his job, however.

“It’s completely different than when I first started,” Stoll said. “One, you have more automation. You can do a lot of your scheduling over the internet and through email. Before you had to make cold calls on the phone, and it was a lot more time consuming.

“On the flip side,” he continued, “there’s more accountability. You used to give a kid a physical form and you were good to go. Now you have emergency medical forms, insurance papers, assumption of risk, everything they have to sign off on. You have to check eligibility issues. There’s a whole list of things. It’s more detail-oriented.”

Graham’s Cupps said he’s sometimes responsible for everything from mowing the fields to painting the lines on the football field.

“The fall is the worst part of the year,” he said. “You have stuff going on inside, outside, soccer, football, volleyball, cross country, golf. There’s always something going on.”

Matt Shomper, who serves as both athletic director at Tippecanoe High School and president of the Ohio Interscholastic Athletic Administrators Association, updates a spreadsheet daily with his work responsibilities.

In the first six months of the academic year, from August until January, Shomper calculated that he worked 155 out of 174 days. That included 83 days involving “evening events,” or athletic events at which at least one athletic administrator (the athletic director or assistant athletic director, if a school has one) must be present.

His contract runs for 226 days, he said.

“I will be at 226 in April,” Shomper said. “But there’s work that has to be done after April, so there’s no choice, I have to keep working.”

That work for athletic directors, officials said, involves a variety of duties. They include: scheduling events, scheduling buses or transportation to events, communicating with and requesting funds from booster clubs, maintaining facilities, ordering uniforms, supervising events, following OHSAA rules and, in some cases, coordinating school-wide volunteer requirements.

“That’s just scratching the surface,” Schoenlein said, noting that at Fairmont there are about 800 athletes in 20 sports and more than 100 paid or volunteer coaches. “My guess would be Brian Donoher worked 100 hours per week.”

Donoher was arrested Feb. 1 and later charged with soliciting a prostitute. The Kettering school board approved a recommendation to consider the termination of Donoher’s contract, and Donoher has requested a hearing on the matter.

Another recent example has underlined athletic directors’ responsibilities for handling money. Jay Minton, the athletic director and football coach at Wayne High School, could be held responsible for $4,176 in missing gate receipts from a Sept. 9, 2011, Warriors home football game, even though he never handled the money, because his department is responsible for the funds.

“That could happen anywhere,” Stoll said. “We’re fortunate we have a good procedure in place. If you’ve got a good procedure in place, the likelihood of that happening is reduced significantly.”

Increasing the options

For several years, the Brookville school district employed one person as both high school assistant principal and athletic director. The district then decided that was too much work for one person and tapped Mike Lindsey, a teacher in the building, to move into the athletic director’s office.

To promote flexibility, Lindsey remains part of the teachers’ association bargaining unit and can enter the classroom when necessary because he holds the proper credentials. For that, he receives a salary of $64,923.

Lindsey also receives a stipend of $6,533 to serve as athletic director, making Brookville one of 11 in the GWOC, SWBL and City League to pay its high school athletic director on a stipend. Brookville Superintendent Timothy Hopkins said the flexibility of placing an athletic director in a classroom as necessary is an attractive part of the stipend system.

Others said the athletic directors have enough responsibilities to make full-time positions or assistant athletic directors worthwhile. At Northmont, football coach Lance Schneider is one of two assistant athletic directors for athletic director Robin Spiller, who also has assistant principal duties at the school.

Understanding and following OHSAA rules and regulations is another challenge, officials said. The association’s handbook includes eight bylaws of the constitution, 21 pages of bylaws and 18 pages of sports regulations.

“It’s not simple to read,” said Tony Mantell, superintendent of Clay Local Schools and president of the Ohio High School Athletic Association Board of Directors. “A lot of things that come down, even from the OHSAA, have to be so legal-specific. You need a second-year law student to probably help you sometimes.”

Whitehead, of the national athletic administrators association, said from his experience a high school athletic director earning six figures is “the exception rather than the rule,” but it’s also a position he feels is worth the money.

“In my personal opinion, I would say the position of athletic director in a district may be the most difficult position,” he said. “That’s in terms of the variety of responsibilities and the hours they’ll put in during a week. There’s just no other job like it.”